Is Diet Pepsi with sucralose healthier than aspartame?

Pepsi will sweeten its Diet Pepsi with sucralose. Diet Coke will stick with aspartame.

First, the bad news: They’re both artificial.

PepsiCo Inc.
PEP, -1.15%
said Monday that it will bring back aspartame-sweetened Diet Pepsi in the U.S. in September ; aspartame is a diet sweetener typically used in sweeteners like Equal. Last August, PepsiCo switched from an aspartame-sweetened version of Diet Pepsi in the U.S. to a version of the beverage sweetened by sucralose, the chemical used in the sweetener brand Splenda. Pepsi will now sell both the aspartame- and sucralose-sweetened versions of Diet Pepsi. .

Diet soda sales have tumbled as consumers, turned off by studies on artificial sweeteners, have switched to bottled water, teas and energy drinks, instead. Widely reported studies have shown a correlation between cancer and aspartame consumption in rats — but not in humans. When it announced its plan for “new” Diet Pepsi last year, PepsiCo said it stood behind the safety of aspartame.

Sales of diet soda drinks have dropped by nearly 20% since reaching a peak of $8.5 billion in 2009, according to market research group Euromonitor, and are expected to continue to slide. In contrast, sales of energy drinks are expected to grow from $12.5 billion last year to $21.5 billion by 2017, according to the market research group Packaged Facts. And in the four decades since Perrier water was launched in the U.S. market in the mid-1970s, U.S. consumption of bottled water has surged 2,700%, to 10.1 billion gallons in 2013, according to the Beverage Marketing Corporation.

The Food and Drug Administration has ruled that artificial sweeteners are safe, and sucralose, which was accidentally discovered by U.K. scientists while they were developing new insecticides, remains the biggest sugar substitute on the market, according to retail tracking service Infoscan Reviews and Information Resources, Inc. Aspartame is made from two amino acids, while sucralose is a modified form of sugar with added chlorine. One 2013 study, however, found that sucralose may alter glucose and insulin levels and may not be a “biologically inert compound.”

“Sucralose is almost certainly safer than aspartame,” says Michael F. Jacobson, executive director at the Center for Science in the Public Interest, a Washington, D.C.-based think tank. Diet Pepsi will still contain another FDA-approved artificial sweetener — acesulfame-potassium, or ace-K — which some researchers have said needs further testing and research. “The fact that Diet Pepsi will be specifically marketed as ‘aspartame free’ is a blunt acknowledgment that consumers have soured on aspartame and the new cans should increase consumer awareness even further and spur other food and beverage companies to abandon it, including Diet Coke.”

Coca-Cola
KO, -0.46%
introduced Coca-Cola Life in the U.S. last year. It has about half the calories of a regular Coke, and uses both cane sugar and the natural plant sweetener Stevia, a sugar substitute that has been growing in popularity in recent years. It’s also available in Chile, Australia, Argentina, New Zealand, the U.K., Ireland, Sweden, and other European countries. To highlight the natural ingredient, Coca-Cola Life will also have a green label instead of the traditional red. Diet Coke still uses aspartame, but a July 2013 study in the journal Food and Chemical Toxicology found that aspartame does not cause health problems like cancer and cardiovascular disease.

Researchers are also divided over whether diet soda actually helps people lose weight. Swapping sugary drinks for diet drinks may condition the body to expect calories, which makes people feel hungrier. Drinking diet soda may confuse our bodies, says Susan Swithers, a professor of psychological sciences and a behavioral neuroscientist at Purdue University in West Lafayette, Ind. who has reviewed studies on diet soda. She says that when people drink diet soda, “the body produces physiological responses — increasing metabolism and releasing hormones — to anticipate the arrival of sugar and calories.”

Even still, some experts point out that “regular” soda is worse. “Reformulated or not, diet sodas probably are still a better choice than full-calorie sodas sweetened with high-fructose corn syrup or sugar,” CSPI’s Jacobson says.

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